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Peres attacks Netanyahu in wake of poverty report
Israel’s former-President Shimon Peres yesterday accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing enough to tackle poverty, prompting Netanyahu’s Likud Party to claim that Peres’s critique was driven purely by political motives.
Speaking at a Food Association conference, Peres responded to a report published this week by anti-poverty NGO Latet, which indicated that 2.5 million Israelis, including 35 per cent of Israeli children live in poverty. The figures are substantially higher than those set out in the National Insurance Institute’s official report. Peres called the Latet report “a serious indictment against ourselves” and pointed the finger at Netanyahu, saying, “The hungry children and elderly cannot be fed with media statements.” Earlier this week, Netanyahu’s announcement of a hike in the minimum wage for public sector workers was condemned by his opponents as cynical electioneering.
In response to Peres’s comments, a Likud statement listed a series of measures taken by the current government, including the introduction of free education for children over three-years-old. The statement said that the “well-timed campaign about the bloated” Latet report was in fact a “twisted way of trying to move votes from the right to the leftist camp — in order to make the concessions and withdrawals that Shimon Peres has been dreaming of for years.”
Labour leader Isaac Herzog scolded Likud for attacking Peres, saying, “While Netanyahu is busy scaring the public with external threats, he grew with his own hands a strategic internal threat with 2.5 million poor people.”
Yesh Atid echoed similar sentiments, despite having held the Finance and Welfare portfolios in the current government. A party statement said, “Netanyahu prefers to transfer hundreds of millions of shekels to isolated settlements in a gesture to the Likud central committee and continues to ignore the plight of Israeli society.” Meanwhile, Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu Party, viewed as having a strong social economic agenda, said “it is unacceptable that children go to sleep hungry and the elderly give up on their medications.”